He said coldly, “You don’t know me well enough to insult me. Even though I’ve worked at your side for ten years.”

Of course that was true, she thought with a stab of guilt. She remembered her resolution on the way out to try to get Nicolaus to open up a little—but on the shield she had been too entranced by her surroundings even to notice him. Would it have made any difference even if she had? Perhaps it was just as well, she thought morbidly, that she would not live long enough to be plagued by such questions.

“Tell me why, Nicolaus. I think you owe me that.”

His voice tight with tension, he said, “I sacrifice my life for El, the One True God.”

And that was enough to tell her everything.

*********

______

Siobhan glanced at the faces on Bisesa’s softwall. “Everybody online? Can you see us?”

With the usual disconcerting lightspeed delays, the others responded.

“No introductions needed, no ceremony. Who wants to start—Eugene?”

When her words reached the Moon, Eugene visibly jumped, as if his attention had been fixed on something else. “Okay,” he said. “First some background. You’re aware of my work on the sun, of course.” The middle of the softwall filled up with an image of the sun, which then turned transparent to reveal onion-skin layers within. The heart of the sun, the fusing core—a star within a star—glowed a sullen red. It was laced by a crisscross pattern of dark and bright stripes, dynamic, elusive, ever shifting. There was a date stamp in the corner, showing today’s date, in March 2040. Eugene said, “These oscillations will lead in the near future to a catastrophic outpouring of energy into the external environment.”

Casually he ran the model forward in time, until the image suddenly flared.

Siobhan felt Toby flinch. He murmured, “He really doesn’t see the impact he has on the rest of us, does he? Sometimes that boy scares me more than the sun itself.”

“But he’s useful,” Siobhan whispered back.

Eugene said, “So the future projection is stable, reliable. But I have had more difficulty with projections into the past. Nothing in the standard models of stellar interior behavior served as a guide. I began to suspect a single impulsive event lay behind this anomalous condition—an anomaly behind the anomaly. But I had trouble converging on a model. My discussions with Lieutenant Dutt, after Professor McGorran put us in touch, gave me a new paradigm to work with.”

Siobhan murmured to Toby, “Told you so.”

Mikhail interceded, “I think you’d better just show us, son.”

Eugene nodded curtly and tapped at an out-of-shot softscreen.

The date stamp began to count down, and the reconstructed events ran backward. As wave modes fluttered across the surface of the core, detail appeared in sidebars: frequencies, phases, amplitudes, lists of the energy shares of the principal vibration modes. As interference, nonlinearity, and other effects worked on the three-dimensional waves, the core’s output peaked and dipped.

Mikhail commented, “Eugene’s model is remarkably good. We have been able to map many of these resonant-peak anomalies onto some of the notable solar weather incidents in our history: the Little Ice Age, the 1859 storm …”

Siobhan had studied wave propagation as applied to the early universe, and she could see the quality of the work here. She said to Toby, “If he gets this anywhere near right, it will be one of the keenest bits of analysis I’ve ever seen.”

“Finest mind since Einstein,” Toby said dryly.

Now things changed on the screen. The oscillations grew wilder. And it seemed to Siobhan that a concentration of energy was gathering in one place.

Unexpectedly a brilliant knot of light rose out of the core, like a gruesome dawn inside the body of the sun itself. And as soon as the knot had left the core, those central oscillations all but ceased.

Eugene paused his projection, leaving the point of light poised on the edge of the core but beneath the blanketing layers of sun above. “At this point my modeling of the core anomaly is smoothly patched to a new routine to project the behavior of the inert radiative zone that lies around the core, and—”

Siobhan leaned forward. “Hold it, Eugene. What is that thing?”

Eugene blinked. “A concentration of mass,” he said, as if it were obvious. He displayed graphs of density. “At this point the mass contained within three standard deviations of the center of gravity is ten to power twenty-eight kilograms.”

She did some quick mental arithmetic. “That’s about five Jupiters.”

Eugene glanced at her, as if surprised she would need a translation into such baby talk. “About that, yes.” He resumed his animation.

That glowing fist of matter rose out of the sun’s heart, up through its layers. As it rose Siobhan saw disturbances like ripples flowing into the mass knot, a glowing tail almost like a comet’s, preceding it on its way to the surface. But she was watching this projection in reverse, she reminded herself. In reality this lump of matter had slammed its way down into the sun, leaving a turbulent wake behind, dumping energy and mass into the sun’s tortured bulk through those mighty waves.

She said, “So that’s how the radiative zone was cut through.”

“Precisely,” Mikhail said. “Eugene’s model is elegant: a single cause to explain many effects.”

The knot of mass, backing out of the sun, now reached the surface and popped out through the photosphere. Again Eugene froze his animation. Siobhan saw that the emergence was close to the sun’s equator.

The date stamp, she noted, showed 4

Eugene said, “Here is the moment of impact. The mass at this point was some ten to power—” He glanced at Siobhan. “About fifteen Jupiters. As it descended into the sun’s interior, the outer layers of the object were of course ablated away, but five Jupiters made it to the core.”

Toby Pitt said, “Fifteen Jupiters. It was a planet—a Jovian, a big one. And, two thousand years ago—it fell into the sun. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Not quite,” Eugene said. He tapped at his softscreen again, and the view abruptly changed. Now the sun was a bright pinpoint at the center of a darkened screen, and the planets’ orbits were traced out as shining circles. “From this point I made another patch, to a simple Newtonian gravity trajectory solution. Corrections for relativity aren’t significant until the impactor passed the orbit of Mercury, and even then they are small …”

Knowing where and how fast his mighty Jovian had splashed into the sun, Eugene had projected back, using Newton’s gravity law, to figure out the path it must have followed to get there. A glowing line, starting in the sun and crossing all the planets’ orbits, swept out of the solar system and off the screen. It curved subtly but was remarkably straight, Siobhan saw.

Toby said, “I don’t understand. Why do you say it didn’t fall into the sun?”

Siobhan said immediately, “Because that trajectory is hyperbolic. Toby, the Jovian was moving faster than solar escape velocity.”

Mikhail said somberly, “It didn’t fall into the sun. It was fired in.”

Toby’s mouth opened, and closed.

Bisesa didn’t seem surprised at all.

The One-Godders had emerged as a kind of reaction to the benevolent Oikumen movement. Fundamentalists of three of the world’s great faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had appealed to their own shared roots. They united under the banner of the Old Testament God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Yahweh, who was thought to have derived from a still older deity called El, a god of the Canaanites.

And El was a meddling god, a brutish, partial, and murderous tribal god. In the late 2020s His first act, through His modern adherents, had been the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, when fanatics, in a self-destructive spasm, had used a nuclear grenade to take out a site of unique significance to at least two of their three intertwined creeds. Miriam remembered that Bud Tooke had been involved in the cleanup.